How one slave deliciously got his own back

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True reparation is impossible – but Jourdon Anderson’s letter to his brutal former owner was a spectacular riposte

In the closing months of the American Civil War, a slave named Jourdon
Anderson was freed by Union troops from the Tennessee plantation where he
had lived, and slaved, all his life. A few years later, now settled in Ohio,
he received a message from his former owner, Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson,
asking him to come back and work for him again.

Jourdon Anderson (pictured) dictated a letter in reply, which was reprinted in
the New York Daily Tribune in 1865, rediscovered in 2012, and can now
be found on the website LettersOfNote.com.